‘This time he’s sure she was making for the river, but not in a straight line. Her shrieks circled about Davidson. He turned on his heels following the horrible trail of sounds in the darkness. He wanted to shout, “This way, Anne! I am here!” But he couldn’t. In the horror of this chase, more ghastly in his imagination than if he could have seen it, the perspiration broke out on his forehead, while his throat was dry as tinder. A last supreme scream was cut short suddenly.

‘The silence which ensued was terrible. Davidson felt sick. He tore his feet from the spot and walked straight before him, gripping the revolver and peering into the obscurity fearfully. Suddenly a bulky shape rose from the ground within a few yards of him and bounded away. He fired at it, started to run in pursuit, and stumbled against something soft which threw him down headlong.

‘Even as he pitched forward on his head he knew it could be nothing else but Laughing Anne’s body. He picked himself up and, remaining on his knees, tried to lift her in his arms. He felt her so limp that he gave it up. She was lying on her face, her long hair scattered on the ground. Some of it was wet. Davidson, feeling about her head, came to a place where the crushed bone gave way under his fingers. But even before that discovery he knew that she was dead. The pursuing Frenchman had flung her down with a kick from behind, and squatting down was battering in her skull, with the weight she herself had fashioned to his stump, when the totally unexpected Davidson loomed up in the night and scared him away.

‘Davidson kneeling by the side of that woman done so miserably to death was overcome by remorse. For she had died, in a way, for him. His manhood was as if stunned. For the first time he felt afraid. He might have been pounced upon in the dark at any moment by the murderer of Laughing Anne. He confesses to the impulse of creeping away from that pitiful corpse on his hands and knees to the refuge of his ship. He even says that he actually began to do so.…

‘One can hardly picture to one’s self Davidson crawling away on all fours from the murdered woman—Davidson unmanned and crushed by the idea that she had died for him in a sense. But he could not have gone very far. What stopped him was the thought of the boy, Laughing Anne’s child, that (Davidson remembered her very words) would not have a dog’s chance.

‘This life the woman had left behind her appeared to Davidson in the light of a sacred trust. He assumed an erect attitude and, quaking inwardly still, turned about and walked towards the house.

‘For all his tremors, he was very determined; but that smashed skull had affected his imagination and he felt very defenceless in the darkness, in which he seemed to hear faintly, now here, now there, the prowling footsteps of the murdering brute. But he never faltered in his purpose.

‘He got away with the boy safely after all. The house he found empty. A profound silence encompassed him all the time, except once, just as he got down the ladder with Tony in his arms, when a faint groan reached his ears. It seemed to come from the pitch black space between the posts on which the house was built, but he did not stop to investigate.

‘It’s no use telling you in detail how Davidson got on board with the burden Anne’s miserably cruel fate had thrust into his arms; how next morning his scared crew, after observing from a distance the state of affairs on board, rejoined with alacrity; how Davidson went ashore and, aided by his engineer (still half dead with fright), rolled up Laughing Anne’s body in a cotton sheet and brought it on board for burial at sea later. While busy with those pitiful remains, Davidson, glancing about, perceived plainly a huge heap of white clothes huddled up against the corner post of the house. That it was the Frenchman lying there he could not doubt. Taking it in connection with the dismal groan he heard in the night, Davidson is pretty sure that his random shot gave a mortal hurt to the murderer of poor Anne.

‘As to the others, Davidson never set eyes on a single one of them. Whether they had concealed themselves in the scared settlement, or bolted into the forest, or were hiding on board Niclaus’ prau, which could be seen lying on the mud a hundred yards or so higher up the creek, the fact is that they vanished; and